Memo To Jared Kushner: Way To Score on Your Own Team’s Goal!

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Buried eleven paragraphs down in the New York Times‘ latest blast against the Trump White House is this little knife in the back of Jared Kushner.

The emails were discovered in recent weeks by Mr. Kushner’s legal team as it reviewed documents, and the team amended his clearance forms to disclose it, according to people briefed on the developments, who like others declined to be identified because of the sensitive political and legal issues involved.

How cute. They use unnamed sources for everything, except when they want to burn a source inside the Trump inner circle. No “on condition of anonymity” for Kushner and his legal team, huh.

The NYT is now playing poke-the-tiger with Trump and his family, hoping possibly to provoke some kind of MacBeth tragedy in the First Family.

Allahpundit popped up his own tub of popcorn for this one. “When Trump inevitably fires Jared, he should have NBC air it live as a very special episode of ‘The Apprentice.'”

The Times goes on to note that Manafort also disclosed the meeting with the Russian lawyer to federal investigators but says nothing about him mentioning emails. Kushner and Manafort are the only members of the inner circle with a conceivable motive to go public with this stuff: Each of them was a much bigger player in the campaign than Don Jr was, so if the fact that the meeting took place had somehow ended up in the papers, the coverage likely would have focused on one or both of them instead of Junior — probably Kushner most of all since, unlike Manafort, he works in the White House as a top advisor. The solution, presumably, was for Team Jared (or Team Paul) to leak the details of the meeting preemptively, emphasizing that Donald Jr, not Kushner or Manafort, had been the one excited at the prospect of Russian-provided oppo on Hillary Clinton. How Kushner’s going to manage his relationship with the president after this, I can’t imagine.

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He also dispenses with the theory that Trump Jr. was handling the disclosure and statement on his own. Shocking, that, because every lawyer I know buried head in hands and sobbed when the emails were tweeted. But most lawyers don’t deal with the Game of Thrones that is the Trump White House.

According to the NYT, it was the president’s own advisors who drafted Junior’s original “adoption” statement and it was the president himself who approved it. Three sources told the Times that Don Jr wanted to come clean and do a full explanation from the beginning, and, er, three other sources claim that Don Jr was adamantly opposed to full disclosure, which demonstrates starkly just how circular this firing squad is right now. Whatever the truth may be as to what Don Jr wanted, why did Team Trump lie in the initial statement about what happened at the meeting knowing that Kushner and Manafort had told the feds about it recently and thus the truth was likely to come out? And why is Team Trump drafting statements for Don Jr anyway? He’s supposed to be a private citizen who’s independent of the administration, right? That’s the whole reason that letting him run the family business is supposedly acceptable: In theory, he’s not interacting with the White House. In reality, the White House is putting out statements in his name. Why would Kasowitz and other Trump family lawyers allow that to happen knowing how it exposes them to conflict-of-interest problems?

Why indeed. Last, Allahpundit points out this little coincidence in timing. Just a coincidence, right?

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I think the whole Trump family needs to get on Air Force One and fly out to a remote island to work out their differences. Maybe a few cage matches. Whoever emerges gets to stay, and the others get to live in exile somewhere cold (like Siberia) until the Master’s term ends or he leaves office.

In the meantime, Jared Kushner has got to be the goat, not as in “greatest of all time” but as in a real goat who scores on his team’s net to lose the game. Apparently they all see the same bus coming and the urge to push the others under it is simply too great.